


If That Was What It Was

by ProtoNeoRomantic



Series: Patch Works [31]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Dysfunctional Family, Extremely Dubious Consent, Extremely Underage, F/M, Family History, Family Secrets, Incest, Mild Sexual Content, The Blitz, non-canon backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-10
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-03-22 06:52:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3719251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is Andrew Giles's earlier written version of the history of their... ahem... "relationship" that ended up being rewritten and given by Emma instead in "Who Do You Think You Are?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	If That Was What It Was

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Who Do You Think You Are?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1235281) by [ProtoNeoRomantic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProtoNeoRomantic/pseuds/ProtoNeoRomantic). 



“We were lovers once,” Andrew explained to Rupert quietly, “And, no, before you start getting any ideas," he added, seeing the gears turning in his son's head by the stiffening of his posture and the look in his eyes, "she is not your mother. This was long before you were born, long before her marriage to Oliver. It was the summer of 1940. The Bitz was ravaging London. Our parents knew too much about what goes on underground in the dark to feel safe hiding us in tunnels. We had our own places of refuge. One of them was a rambling old estate that belonged to a Mrs. Smith, my grandfather’s oldest sister, her grandfather’s cousin. It had been the country home of Richard and Katherine Giles and before that of Katherine's father, James Crowne. A score of his grandchildren’s grandchildren gathered there, including all the sons and daughters of Peter Travers.

“Mrs. Smith fretted and doted over her own brood and let the rest of us run wild, so Emma, bless her soul, being the oldest of all these scattered chicks appointed herself a hen and set about keeping us more or less organized and in line. Quentin bore the brunt of her stiff and unintuitive attempts at mothering, being the youngest of us all, not six until the middle of the summer. I was the oldest boy at fourteen, with my good friend Patrick Sterling being the only other boy above the age of twelve. The Travers girls were all older than us and the Smith girls younger. Pat was alternately in love with Kay and Grace, neither of whom could be bothered with him. As for the whole lot of them I felt no more than lascivious curiosity.

“Emma ordered me about exactly as if she were my mother except that she exhorted me with my duty to help her and to be a guide and example to ‘the children’ exactly as if I were her husband. To this day I don’t know when or how the one thing led to the other, but well, there was never a hen so in need of a cock as a deathly serious and only moderately bright seventeen-year-old girl who has made herself responsible for seeing to it that the Earth spins on its axis. I was nothing like a man of course, but I was all that was readily available and she was only just a woman.

“It was a tedious affair if that was what it was. She remained someone I might sneak and avoid so that I could fish or hike or whatever else with Pat instead of doing my chores. The whole business was more… domestic than romantic, hardly even that. She never behaved with a great deal affection or passion towards me even when we were making love or having criminal conversation or whatever we were doing. It was always quick and quiet, because Quentin was usually in the room with us, supposedly asleep. We never really even liked each other, we certainly were not ‘in love’, a state I then thought to be the invention of poets, a mere convention.

“And then the bombardment lessened and autumn came. I went back to Walsington, Emma enrolled in University and nothing else was ever said about it. We never exchanged so much as a post card until, years later when we began to have official business through the Council, and in that regard our correspondence has been nothing but professional. Over the years there were small things (and some not so small, but still ambiguous) that caused me wonder if her father was also my father, but I tried not to find out. I told myself it didn’t matter, there was no way we could have known. I comforted myself with the fact that I still didn’t know. But the shock I felt when I finally read the confirmation of it (in such cruel form, from her own infant lips) was more the loss of a merciful uncertainty than the revelation of any new and surprising fact. As shocking a fact as it was to have confirmed, as much as I would move the world to keep it hidden, it was, by then, hardly my darkest secret.”

 

 


End file.
